March 2, 2010

Receipts

After just taking a business trip myself, this idea of digital receipts sounds appealing. Having to keep up with a million paper receipts and try to turn them in is never fun!

I ran across this link about Digital Receipts that caught my attention. This sounds great to me, but I am not convinced that it is feasible. First of all, the digital receipts will have to be transferred to the consumer in an open format that various applications can use. Otherwise, I will be left out because proprietary solutions and Linux don’t usually mix well. Secondly, many places that I go seem to do good getting a credit card machine to work much less a point-of-sale system that delivers digital receipts!

I think the more realistic solution is a phone application like “Expense Manager” that digitizes the receipt on site. This way the receipt is tracked digitally but it doesn’t require anything of the vendor. I am still working to get it perfected. I didn’t use it this past trip for some reason. I am not sure exactly why.